There are a lot of external hard drives out there, and most of them are unremarkable. In their defence, there’s hardly any extra functionality that you can integrate into the device itself. Which is why it’s nice to see the designers of the Western Digital My Book have put some thought into how they can make a usually boring external drive interesting.

On the front is a single button surrounded by two translucent rings, which are backlit with blue LEDs. The outer ring indicates power and drive access, while the inner ring (the trump card) gauges the remaining space with a series of six LEDs. Why has nobody thought of this before?

Out of the box the drive is formatted as a single 500GB FAT32 partition, which means you’ll be able to both read and write to it under all OSes. If you want to repartition it manually, be aware that Windows XP and 2000 will limit the FAT32 capacity to 32GB artificially.

There are a selection of tools for PC and Mac included in folders on the drive which include -- among other tools like Google Desktop search -- a proprietary backup program that can be configured for full or incremental backups, known simply as WD Backup. It can search for file extensions of media files or documents, and then drops them into a backup file in a dated folder at the top of the drive’s directory tree.

To cover the connectivity bases, there are both USB and FireWire ports on the back of the drive. There is a pro edition available that includes FireWire 800 if you need it, but the bandwidth requirements of a single drive should be amply met by USB2 and FireWire 400. It even looks good, too.

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